Tea Party Gives Founding Fathers a Role in Midterms

The tea party-fueled midterm elections of 2010 have featured a surprising group of men in a cameo role: the Founding Fathers. And for much of the debate over the United States’ origins, the Democrats have ceded the field.

This March 8, 2010photo shows Tea Party member Greg Hernandez, of Quicksburg, Va., at a rally in Richmond, Va. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

From Alaska to Utah to Kentucky to Delaware, Republican Senate candidates, backed by the tea party, have broadly asserted that the U.S. federal government for decades has exceeded the boundaries of the Constitution and the will of its drafters, who they say envisioned a weak central government empowered mainly to defend the country and govern truly interstate commerce.

The Constitution was front and center in Tuesday’s debate between Delaware Senate candidates Christine O’Donnell, the Republican nominee and tea party favorite, and Democrat Chris Coons. At one point, Ms. O’Donnell likened Mr. Coons’s position on evolution to those of “our so-called leaders in Washington” who have rejected the “indispensible principles of our founding.” After Mr. Coons shot back that “one of those indispensible principles is the separation of church and state,” Ms. O’Donnell demanded, “Where in the Constitution is separation of church and state?”

Rand Paul, the ophthalmologist running for the Senate in Kentucky, tells tea party supporters the government ran off the constitutional rails in 1942, after the Supreme Court in Wickard v. Filburn ruled that federal laws governing crop production are constitutional because a farmer affects the price of a crop by selling it or not selling it on the open market.

“It’s not just about politics,” he said of his campaign at a tea party gathering outside Louisville. “It’s about understanding how we got here, how we got to such an expansive government.”

In an interview last week, Mike Lee, almost certainly the next senator from Utah, said the federal government is violating the tenets of the founders when it imposes rules on activities engaged solely within a single state, from mine safety to elementary and secondary education to the minimum wage. Sure, the Supreme Court has upheld numerous laws he believes are unconstitutional, but, he said, it is up to lawmakers not only to follow the judgments of courts but also to make their own judgments based on their understanding of the Constitution.

“The idea of eliminating the federal minimum wage is not an issue that comes up frequently. What does come up every single day, many times a day, is the fact that the federal government is doing things that are difficult to reconcile with the text of the U.S. Constitution,” Mr. Lee said.

How are Democrats countering? Last week, Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway did deliver a speech on the Constitution, challenging Mr. Paul’s ideas, known as “originalism” in judicial circles.

“I’m going to step up and protect the Constitution of the United States, because it’s a roughly 220-year-old, living and breathing document that tries to take us not to a perfect union but to a more perfect union,” he said, “and it’s a document that allows us to move forward, forward for women, forward for people of color, forward for seniors, forward for disabled vets, forward for people that need looking out for. That’s what it means to have a more perfect union, not to have a radical view of the Constitution that would take us back to a place we do not need to go.”

But he is a lonely voice. Asked whether other Democrats are engaging their Republican adversaries in constitutional debate, spokesmen for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said they would rather talk about jobs. Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, routinely did verbal and written battle with the originalists before President Barack Obama tapped him to be his White House director of regulatory affairs. A spokesman this week said Mr. Sunstein would not engage the debate.

“As this falls outside of his responsibilities in his current role, we will have to decline on this one,” said spokeswoman Meg Reilly.

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